


we rode our bikes into the sky

by mimosaeyes



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: Aged-Up Character(s), Character Study, Cohabitation, College era, Domestic, Established Relationship, F/M, Future Fic, Hurt/Comfort, POV Adrien Agreste, Sabine and Adrien speak Chinese!, Sharing a Bed, Slice of Life, as in third person POV don't worry about it, baked goods puns, first comes fluff with hints of spice, gratuitous good-with-children scene, pirates and pigeons!, post-kwami, post-reveal, then comes angst with mild sin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-22
Updated: 2016-02-29
Packaged: 2018-05-22 15:59:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,696
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6085927
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mimosaeyes/pseuds/mimosaeyes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which superheroes still act like superheroes without their masks on - whether they're saving civilians, or each other.</p><p>Two-fold study of Adrinette in the future, with all the parallels.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. dusk

**Author's Note:**

> I've marked up this work as having two chapters but frankly my drafts are exploding with ideas to take it further. Let me know if you'd be interested in seeing that / if you have anything to contribute. As in, even silly stuff like "I think Adrien might be a linguistics major" or "you know what this needs? leaf-blowers".
> 
> Mood music: Running by No Doubt, and Remember Me As A Time of Day by Explosions in the Sky.
> 
> Title from Hold Back the River by James Bay: once upon a different life / we rode our bikes into the sky

He gets past reception by flashing them a smile amped up to dazzling, and looking as officious as he can — skills learned from his father that he for once does not begrudge. Then he’s weaving through the corridors, eyes trained on the signs that line the ceiling to know which turn to make next. 

His phone buzzes, a sudden shock against his clammy palm. _Alright, keep me posted_ reads Mrs. Dupain-Cheng’s text message. She’s terse. He’s barely keeping it together. But he fires off something reassuring to his girlfriend’s mother anyway before slipping his phone into his jeans pocket and ducking around one last group of orderlies into a bustling room full of cots on which people recline in various states of consciousness. There are nurses and doctors about too, crowding up his field of vision, but he casts around...  

And there she is. Adrien doesn’t know when it started exactly, but he can always pick her out of a crowd. She has this solid, effusive presence that he just orients to, like a compass needle pointing north.

(“Or like a homing pigeon,” she teased him that one time he told her as much, and with his head resting on her stomach, he could feel her shaking with laughter.

“Pigeons mate for life,” he replied glibly, “and now that I’ve made that connection, you’d best hope I don’t remember this conversation when I’m brainstorming how to pop the question.”

Her fingers didn’t even pause in carding through his hair as she deadpanned, “You mean you weren’t going to use ‘Mari me?’”)

“Mari,” Adrien says, only the memory and the worry and the relief make it catch in his throat. His voice can’t have carried that far, but she looks up right at him and smiles. A spot above her left temple near the hairline is just turning black and blue from some earlier hit she took. She’s perched on a gurney next to a somewhat disheveled little boy who’s engrossed in swinging his legs to the same rhythm as hers — a simple game, but he seems to relish it. As he takes a step closer she pats the kid’s hand comfortingly, all Ladybug in that moment, kind and strong and _his_.

Then he’s hugging her, inhaling the scent of her hair, steadying her post-adrenaline tremors. “Sorry I scared you,” she whispers, breath hot against his ear, and just like that the strain in his chest collapses in on itself. “I would have called, but my phone screen cracked in the melée…”

“Rose called me.” He shrugs, pulling back from the embrace but lingering close enough that they can loosely clasp each other’s forearms. As long as they have known each other, he’s had a couple of inches at least on her, and from where she’s seated now, the height difference noticeably persists. It’s one of the many things he loves about kissing her — getting to see her tilt her face up to his in the moment before he closes his eyes; bowing his own head down almost reverently to her lips.

He kind of wants to kiss her right now, as though he can’t be certain that she’s real and here and safe until he’s reconnected with her, tasted once more her cherry blossom mouth, tangled his fingers in her hair.

He occupies himself with the task of looking her over instead. “Creep got in a lucky shot?”

“Just the one,” she counters smugly, then notices the latent worry etched into his expression. “I’m fine, it’s just that Rose didn’t feel good about letting me go on home unaccompanied like this.”

He’s still going to fuss over her later, but for now he meets her twinkling eyes and there is tacit agreement in them to defer their real reunion. As superheroes they always prioritized others. It’s enough for him just to stand beside her again.

(“‘Mari me’ is _easy_. I can do better than that,” he scoffed. 

“Show me _better_ ,” she rallied, her eyes suddenly dark, thirsty. His lips quirked up into that one Chat Noir grin that she once described as savage. 

Any pigeons in the eaves would have blushed and cooed.) 

“And who’s this little one?” Adrien asks, shifting his gaze to the child next to her. He can’t be much older than five. His sneakered feet dangle and swing over the side, nowhere near touching the ground.

Marinette nudges the boy encouragingly and mutters something low enough that only he can hear. At her prompting he looks shyly up at Adrien. “Jordan,” he introduces himself, and drops his gaze uncertainly back to the ground. 

Adrien doesn’t even think about it as he instinctively crouches so that he’s in Jordan’s line of sight. There’s a small bandage over the boy’s right eyebrow and half his eye that he seems to have been hiding by ducking his head.

“Are you a pirate, Jordan?” he asks, widening his eyes in amazement. Out of the corner of his eye he catches the fond look Marinette directs at him. Warmth suffuses him.

It’s exactly the right thing to say. Jordan’s embarrassment seems to simply fall away. “Mama says I’m too clumsy to be a pirate!” he cries, suddenly animated.

“Nooo, surely not,” Adrien says in disbelief. “You’d make a great pirate with that eyepatch! And this, _oh_ ,” he enthuses, patting the frame of the gurney, “ _this_ is the finest ship I’ve seen!” 

Jordan’s eyes go wide. “Do you really think so, Mr. Superhero?” 

Before he can enthuse any more about pirates, though, a woman’s voice calls, “Jordan!” from the doorway. Adrien looks in the direction of the sound to see a middle-aged lady in office attire, her hair pulled back into a bun that’s gone slightly frazzled. 

“Time to swim on back to your mum, Jordan,” Marinette tells him with a wistful smile that Adrien knows only he can tell is weary.

He stands to help the boy safely off the gurney. “Man overboard!” he announces, lifting him up. Jordan chimes in and seems almost put out when he’s set back on the floor, but quickly becomes absorbed in froggy paddling with his arms over to his mother, who gives Marinette one last grateful look as she takes her son’s hand and leads him away. 

Once they’ve rounded the corner, Marinette sighs, resting her elbows on her knees as she closes her eyes and rubs at the bridge of her nose.

“I met them in the waiting room. She’s working overtime and still had to call Jordan’s dad for help paying the medical bill,” she tells him quietly. “Long-distance. I think they’re living apart.”

He frowns at that but nods attentively, encouraging her to keep going. It’s how she decompresses after a stressful day at school or, what seems like a lifetime ago, after an akuma attack gone south. (“You saved Paris again today,” he assured her, that first time she felt bad about burdening him with her fears even after spending the entire day tight-lipped and brittle. “Let me just save you.”) 

“We were pretending our legs were oars and the cot was a boat.” Marinette smiles, glancing at the bit of rumpled sheets where Jordan was seated. “How did you know exactly what to say?”

“How did you know he would trust me if you told him I used to be a superhero?” he counters.

(She stuttered at the time, afraid maybe of engaging with the frightening level of dependence they had come to have on each other. “You have it easy, then,” she teased, but with solemn eyes.

“But if I save you, I save my whole _world_ ,” he quipped, and then dashed away across the rooftops pursued by a Ladybug decidedly displeased with the new heights of cheesiness her partner had reached.)

“You still are,” she tells him, honest but distant; and he hears  _You’re still saving me_  like an echo behind what she actually means _._  Or maybe she’s lost in the very same memory.

She’s still got a haunted look in her eyes, either way. He reaches up to brush her fringe back, tucking it delicately behind her ear. “Something else is bothering you,” he prompts.

Marinette nods absently, biting her lip. Her voice rises alarmingly as she starts to recall, “If I hadn’t been there—some would-be mugger pulled a _knife_ on her, Adrien, who pulls a knife on someone like  _Rose_ —”

“Hey, hey,” Adrien quickly stops her, and snags hold of her wrists. She’s unconsciously clenched her hands into fists. He turns to face her, slotting his narrow hips between her knees. “Don’t think about that, don’t do that to yourself,” he scolds gently, watching her until she meets his gaze. When she finally does, eyes brimming with tears, he slides both his hands up her forearms, and leans in close enough that their foreheads touch.

“And it happens all the time, it _could happen again_ , to anyone else,” she protests next, but again he shushes her. 

“You stopped it this time,” he tells her as they are mere inches apart, “and just one time makes a difference.”

Rose, their old classmate, is a nurse now on her mandatory stint in the accident and emergency clinic. For a sweet, gentle soul, she’s turned out crazy resilient, succinctly detailing to him over the phone Marinette’s minor injuries (and how she barely noticed them, worrying first and foremost about Rose) with a detached calm that echoed but ultimately contained her terror.

Insidiously, time has been passing and forcing them all to keep growing up. They are learning that there are many worse things in the world than akumas that give people the power to act on their impulsive emotions. There are evils that cannot be purified even by a girl armed with a heart of gold and a magical yo-yo. 

He breaks their contact to cup her cheek instead, and she leans into his touch.

“I gave her your number in case she needed help with anything,” Marinette muses, “but I don’t know if she would call...”

“They’re going to be fine,” Adrien assures her, even as he makes a mental note to turn off the anonymous call block on his phone. His private line is privileged information, known only to close friends; most acquaintances get patched through to his staff on the corporate desk. But of course he doesn’t mind that she’s given out his number to a disenfranchised woman whose only helpline might well be them. He just needs her to stop looking like the weight of the world is crushing her. She never looked so vulnerable, so helpless as Ladybug. There was always one more absurd idea to try that would nevertheless pan out by sheer force of luck, and will.

Those days are gone whether they like it or not. But they still have each other. They have this.

He kisses her forehead, careful to avoid the bruising that’s blooming under her skin. “Did you ever even register with the A&E staff?” he asks idly, tilting her head back to check the dilation of her pupils using his phone as a makeshift flashlight. “I don’t know if we’re allowed to be back here.” 

“I was watching Jordan,” she explains, and then realising what he’s doing, insists, “I don’t have a concussion.” She makes a moue at him that she will later deny, and pokes away his arm. He lets her, but moves on to examining her hand instead. Supporting her wrist with his left hand, he skims his fingers ever so lightly over hers. The skin over her knuckles is flushed red from the punches she threw with all the force that her Ladybug suit would once have allowed her to use. She’s never been in a fistfight outside of costume, so it makes sense that although her technique and form are on point, she wouldn’t have been regulating how much of her strength went into each blow. Particularly since the would-be mugger was threatening Rose.

He’s let the silence grow protracted as he checks her over. Aware that she’s watching him, heavy-lidded and assenting, Adrien presses his lips tenderly to her knuckles, then drags his gaze up to meet hers. He’s surprised — starting up in her eyes is that familiar old hunger for him that stays novel and enthralling no matter how many times he sees it or satisfies it. 

She visibly swallows. “Let’s go home?” she manages to say.

“As long as you’re sure you’re okay,” Adrien concedes, and as if in earnest answer, the next thing he knows her legs are wrapping around his hips, her arms are loosely encircling his neck. He lifts her off the gurney, arms supporting her weight even though her core is tight and lets her cling to him perfectly stably on her own. Her lips brush against his cheek teasingly as he sets her on the ground, and surely she _must_ know what it’s doing to him as she lets her torso slide against his, mussing up his clothes and pushing her blouse up to expose a bit of her midriff. Nearby, a young orderly blushes and abruptly makes an about-turn.

“We’re getting painkillers for your head first, just in case,” Adrien tells her firmly, and by the time they’re done waiting in line at the pharmacy he almost regrets keeping that modicum of self-control. But his Lady’s wellbeing comes first, even before her pleasure if need be. 

He settles for keeping his hand on the small of her back as they walk, and as they enter the mostly deserted carpark, lets it drop just that critical bit lower.

* * *

In her post-adrenaline tiredness, Marinette dozes off by the third traffic light junction from the hospital, and by the time they pull up at the kerb outside their apartment block she’s so soundly asleep that she doesn’t stir as he turns off the engine, gets out, and goes round to her side to carry her in. He moves as if in a dream, mellow and settled for the first time this evening. He’s been driving slowly with the radio down low, letting the motion of the car lull her to sleep. 

When he lifts her up into his arms, she snuggles instinctually against his chest. Her hand fists gently yet posessively around the fabric of his shirt as he lingers by the car door, adjusting his grip so she’s comfortable and secure.

When he gets to the front door he realises he hasn’t quite thought this through. He has no hand free to get his keys out. So Adrien stands there hesitating a good long moment, until she creaks open one eye to peer up at him. He gives her a sheepish grin. It takes her barely a second to suss out the situation.

“This is why I come up with the plan of attack,” she tells him fondly, then stretches, fluid and graceful in his arms, to slip a hand into his pocket for his keys. Her quick mind always wakes up before the rest of her, though, so she ends up fumbling blearily around his pelvic area, over which his skinny jeans are stretched sinfully tight. He’s gained some muscle mass since they were teenagers, and if anything, has thighs even better for the look.

“Or I could just set you down and get out my keys like a normal person,” he suggests. His voice is more breathy than he would like to admit.

Marinette makes a _tsk tsk_ sound as she continues to work. “Am I making you blush?” she teases. “Such a teenager. You’re _easy_.”

He grouses halfheartedly but stills. She has to dig out his phone, too, and holds onto it while she works at getting to the keys. When she finally has them in hand, he bends his knees enough that she can reach the lock, and only as the door swings open does he catch the downright mischievous gleam in her eye. 

A thought occurs to him. “Wait, are you playing me? Were you just going to let me be all Big Romantic Gesture and then make fun of me later?”

“What of it?” she asks, as if it’s a given. It also seems like a given that her boyfriend says the words Big Romantic Gesture in such a way that she can hear the capitals. She looks up at him expectantly, the corners of her lips threatening to twitch up into a smile. Her voice is coy as she whispers, “Carry me over the threshold, kitty.” 

So he does, holding her close to avoid bumping against the doorframe. She wraps her arms around his neck with an easy languor.

And then of course, just as they’re halfway up the stairs to their apartment on the upper floor, his phone starts ringing, startling her so much that she almost drops it. 

“Oh, get that, it’s your mum,” Adrien urges her, stopping mid-step. “I promised you would call as soon as you got home.”

“Seriously?” she hisses at him. “How much have you told her?”

She sounds almost betrayed — but has a tinge of guilt in her tone too. She hates letting her mum worry about her. It’s why Marinette kept her in the dark about her superheroic activities in the first place.

She accepts the call. “Hi Mum,” she says, cradling the phone against her ear. He continues climbing the staircase as she talks. “I’m fine, just a light tap to the head. Adrien picked me up. From the hospital, I mean. Um.” 

He almost chuckles but holds it back. There’s not much light, just the faint streetlamp glow coming in through the glass window set into the front door, plus a bit coming off his phone screen, but he’s willing to bet that Marinette’s cheeks are at least a little flushed right now. It’s payback enough for her antics. The incoherent babbling that used to happen around him has long transferred itself to situations involving him. Which really doesn’t make any sense, seeing as they’ve been together for years now and literally everyone they know, knows it; but it’s endearing for precisely that reason.

“Yeah, we’re just getting in now,” Marinette says as he reaches the landing and bends his knees again to let her open the front door to their apartment. “We didn’t forget to call you, I promise. _Someone_ was probably driving slowly to let me sleep.”

She pauses, listening, while he boops his nose at the light switch to illuminate their living room. A look crosses her face, that somehow combines amazement and consternation and amusement all at once. He can tell she’s fighting to keep her tone sounding normal as she assures her mum, “He’s probably going to bully me into skipping lecture tomorrow morning, so yeah, I’ll rest up.”

She glances with a raised eyebrow at him as if to verify this. He hums and nods. She can watch the webcast from home. 

“Mhmm. Yup. Love you! Give my love to Dad,” she’s saying just as he nudges open their bedroom door with his foot. Then, “Yeah, he’s right here. Hang on,” and she offers the phone to him.

Depositing Marinette on the bed and leaving her to wash up, he raises the phone to his ear as he trots back out to the kitchen that adjoins their living room. He’s a little apprehensive about this. Not that he doesn’t talk pretty regularly to both her parents — it’s just that usually when they call him, it’s to fuss over whether he’s eating enough or sleeping enough, not whether he’s managing to keep their daughter out of potentially life-threatening situations. 

“喂？” he says, the standard Chinese greeting over the phone.

“Hello, Adrien,” Sabine greets him warmly. He lets her talk as he fills a jug with water and gets down a glass from the cupboard overhead, the top shelf of which is just out of Marinette’s reach unless she clambers up onto the counter. He noticed this literally less than a day after they moved in, but she took such offence at the short stool he bought for her that now it lies collecting dust in a corner of the spare cabinet.

“I’ve heard my daughter’s voice and she sounds okay, but what about you?”

He pauses at the unexpected shift of focus onto himself. “I’m good,” he’s surprised into blurting out. His brow furrows. Why wouldn’t he be alright? He’s not the one who fought off a mugger going after his ex-classmate tonight.

The older woman leaves a pause before speaking again, that tells him she’s not convinced. When she speaks next it’s to chide, “You aren’t practising your Chinese. You’re going to forget it if you don’t, you know.”

He was taking his cues from her when he switched out of Chinese, but okay. “嗯，我还好,” Adrien repeats his previous statement. Admittedly, he is getting a little rusty, but talking with Sabine keeps him roughly conversant. Sabine enjoys it, too; she doesn’t get to hear much of her native tongue in France. He holds the phone to his ear using his shoulder as he picks up the tray he’s prepared with the water jug and glass on it.

Sabine responds in Chinese this time. “我的女儿是好心人，也很有决心。她从小就爱帮人，自己受到伤害都不介意。” _My daughter is kind-hearted, and determined. She’s always loved to help others, even if she gets hurt in the process._

Her next words hit him hard and he has to pause just outside the bedroom door, which is slightly ajar. “她完全信赖着你，你知道吗？” _She relies completely on you, you know that?_  Only the word doesn’t just mean ‘rely’. It also connotes trust in his support; deference to his judgment. 

( _You’re still saving me_ ,comes the echo again.)

“知道，” he manages to say, biting his lip. After thinking over his word choice a moment, he adds, “我也一直信任她。”

Discounting contextual clues, Chinese has no tense markers per se. The distinctions of past from present and future are fundamentally not as important in it. This is something he remembers all the way from his first studies in the language. So when he says _I know. I’ve always trusted her,_ he also says _I trust her still_ , and at a stretch _I will always trust her._ To know what she can do to help, and to know where to stop.

Like daughter, like mother. Mrs. Dupain-Cheng is, apparently, a master schemer for getting him to speak to her in Chinese. It gets him to say so much more than he would otherwise.

“那好，” Sabine replies. It means  _That’s good to hear_  but it comes across like an acquittal, like he’s being forgiven for letting her get hurt, before he even realised he was feeling guilt over it. And he’s not sure he deserves her grace but she’s giving it anyway, just like he’s still not sure after all this time what he ever did to deserve her daughter, but he wakes up beside Marinette every morning and gets to try live up to her love.

“你们俩好好照顾自己哦！” Sabine says, and hangs up, leaving him staring into space for a moment before shaking himself and entering the bedroom, the words still echoing in his head.  _You two take care!_

Marinette has burrowed deeply into a cocoon made of downy blanket, eyes shut in bliss. He puts the tray down silently on her nightstand, not trusting himself to speak yet. Without really thinking about it, he sets his phone down on the bed next to her, and leans over to tuck her in.

“You’re fussing,” she tells him.

“No I’m not,” Adrien says, fussily.

There’s something a little off in his voice, though. Even he can tell. Marinette opens her eyes and looks him over searchingly, taking in the vulnerability that is evident on his face. It’s the same characteristic look he gets thinking about his mother on the anniversary of the day she went missing, even now. 

“She mum’d you,” Marinette concludes. She sits up in bed, crossing her legs under the sheets. He perches in the space she leaves but stares pointedly at her hands where they rest atop the blanket. After a moment she notices.

“Hey,” she says, and waits till he meets her gaze. “If she can tell how you’re feeling just over the phone, I can read you even clearer. Don’t start blaming yourself. You couldn’t have known.”

He bites his lip briefly. “Yeah,” he starts to say. He’s become better at vocalising what he’s feeling since he’s gotten together with her, but there’s no totally erasing the reservation instilled in him by a neglectful childhood full of solitary meals and large empty rooms.

So he shifts the topic back to her welfare. Something he’s more than comfortable talking about. “You don’t seem to have a concussion but in the middle of the night if  _anything_ hurts or feels weird, you wake me up _immediately_ , okay?”

Her brow furrows. She knows what he’s trying to do with the distraction, and for a moment she looks like she’s about to call him out on it, but instead she gives him space. “Okay,” she agrees, and her eyes are resigned but soft, not hard. There’s still a longing in them, but even as he watches she holds herself back, clearly sensing his mood has changed.

After he’s brushed his teeth and changed into his pyjamas, Adrien clambers into bed next to her, turning off his bedside lamp as he does. She snuggles up to him immediately.

He starts stroking her hair, keeps going until she falls asleep. Then he lies awake a little longer, watching her in the dim light, thinking he has so much more to lose now than he’s had all his life.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *shrugs* I headcanon that they wouldn't keep being superheroes forever. Until we have confirmation on how the kwamis work, though, I'm deliberately writing so it's ambiguous how they parted ways.
> 
> Further ambiguities necessary because canon-compliant is my jam: where Gabriel Agreste is just in case he turns out to be Hawkmoth as the popular fan theory has it; whether anyone ever found out about their superhero activities; how the identity reveal happened and when relative to their relationship officially starting.


	2. dawn

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mood music: Masollan by Balmorrhea and All Our Lives by Max Milner.
> 
> This chapter brought to you by lyrics to Need The Sun To Break by James Bay: I’m halfway gone / sleepless I’m battle worn / and you’re all I want / so bring me the dawn / I need the sun to break / you’ve woken up my heart, I’m shaking / all my luck could change

He doesn’t bolt upright screaming like they do in the movies. Children cry for attention or because they just can’t stop, and growing up, Adrien has never been indulged in any such luxuries. So when he gasps sharply into wakefulness, he merely lies still a while, heart racing, then flicks his gaze over to her side of the bed.

In the cool darkness of their bedroom he can just about make out her sleeping form. Her breathing is deep and even, and normally a safe harbour from the kinds of horrors he still dreams up, the ways his subconscious likes to remind him that their stints as superheroes could have ended. Plenty of people dream about falling, just for a second before they jerk awake; he relives the memory of tumbling helplessly from a height with her, the rush of air and thud of pulse loud in his ears as they approached the unforgiving ground, and in the moment before Ladybug came up with an ingenuous plan to save both their lives he pictured his mother’s face and wondered if she would ever find out what happened to him.

Those kinds of nightmares still shake him, but they don’t get to him like the phantasmagoria he’s just woken out of. The clock on his nightstand reads 4:13. Clamping down on the urge to reach over and wake her up, Adrien overcompensates and very carefully extricates himself from the sheets so as to avoid rousing her.

He takes his phone with him. Maybe he’ll go for a run, that might take the tension out of his limbs. He keeps some t-shirts and sweatpants out in the spare cabinet for such occasions. When he was still Chat Noir he would have transformed and headed out onto the twilit streets, watching Paris wake up around him until it was almost time to face the day. And if a little too often he wound up heading instinctually for a certain balcony with potted plants and fairy lights, at least he had the discipline to steer himself away before her early-rising parents had cause to wonder what was going on between their daughter and one half of the city’s superhero duo.

There’s an unread message waiting for him. No words, just a selfie from Juleka of herself and Rose. Juleka is touching the fingertips of her right hand to her chin in the start of what Adrien dimly recalls her showing him is the sign for “thank you” when she was taking classes so she could work with the hearing-impaired. Her left arm reaches out of the frame to hold her phone and Rose peeps over it in order to be in the shot, like some koala clinging to a eucalyptus tree branch. They’re adorable together, as they always are in the photos they like to take. 

It brings a tentative smile to his face, and he pauses with his hand halfway to the front doorknob. Years after graduating, his high school class may not still be actively in touch, but whenever they make contact it’s like no time has passed at all. Adrien turns on the main light instead and sinks down onto a chair at the kitchen table to type out a quick response. He’ll show Marinette when she wakes up.

As he hits send the nightmare comes back to him with a vengeance, as if refusing to let him go. It’s the disorientation that drags him back, starkly unlike the certainty of unreality that makes his other subconscious fears surmountable. There’s no context, no background, just flashing hazard lights and every colour too saturated but above all _red red red_ oozing beneath his scrabbling fingers, and the whole world a confusion, a whirlpool, a last breath drawn— 

He lets the phone fall onto the table and leaps to his feet. He needs to do something with his hands, occupy himself enough that he distracts his mind. Without really thinking about it, he pads over to the refrigerator and opens the door, picking out eggs and butter and unsweetened chocolate in a large block. Then it’s over to the cupboards for flour and walnuts and sugar, all of which he starts combining in a large mixing bowl. Somewhere in the back of his mind run Tom Dupain-Cheng’s instructions, drilled into him over afternoons spent labouring away in the patisserie.

Baking started as an excuse to linger at her place and avoid going back to his, but became a real hobby as he discovered genuine delight in _making_ things, dicing and stirring and weighing. It’s obscurely comforting. 

In his reverie, he underestimates the amount of cookie dough that should go into each dollop at first and makes the last few extra-generous rather than go back and even things out. The batch will probably come out wonky looking, but it doesn’t even matter. Maybe that’s what’s freeing to him about baking. He’ll never be particularly good with the whole aesthetics and artistry thing — that’s Marinette’s department — but when they work together, they fall into a natural synchronicity distantly redolent of their superheroing days. 

(“Let me ice your cupcakes,” she offered laughingly one time, after watching him dither over them with his piping-bag.

He waggled his eyebrows. “Using baking pick-up lines now, m’lady?”)

Adrien sets the timer on the oven and bungs in the tray. Then he doesn’t really know what to do with himself once more. He starts washing up the various implements he’s made use of, gingerly making as little commotion as he can while he stacks them up on the draining board.

Just as he’s about to put the excess ingredients back in their rightful places, though, a loud buzzing noise shatters the early morning quiet. Startled, he’s momentarily at a loss regarding its source: but then he remembers his phone on the table and hurries over, more to stop the ruckus than to answer the call.

It’s a quarter past five in the morning. Who calls at this hour? Is it an emergency? His stomach plummets as the thought crosses his mind.

The number isn’t in his list of saved contacts. He picks up.

“Hello?” he hears a tentative voice say.

“Jordan,” Adrien recognises, relief making his voice come out all in a rush. Right, Marinette gave his number to the boy’s mother last night. He’s still staring at the clock face and his tension has changed but is still there as he asks, “What are you doing awake, buddy?” 

There’s a brief eruption of static over the line. “I couldn’t sleep. My mum said she couldn’t come tuck me in,” Jordan confides, his voice a hushed whisper. “I… I can hear her crying but she said not to disturb her tonight so I didn’t know what to do and, and I went to get this number from her purse which was on the table.”

“Of course, of course,” Adrien hushes him, because he's starting to babble, hysterical and apologetic. “Are you looking for Marinette? I could go get her.” She wouldn’t mind, he’s sure of it. And he knows no one better at comforting little children —at least, ever since she got the hang of it after enough afternoons of babysitting Manon. 

“No,” Jordan says after a moment. He sounds unsure initially but his voice gets firmer as he justifies, with the air of someone repeating a mantra, “I need to be a big boy and go to bed on my own.”

The words are hard in a way that Adrien doubts could have come from the gentle, compassionate woman who is Jordan’s mother. “Who told you to be a big boy, Jordan?” he probes. 

“My dad,” comes the response promptly. Jordan sounds almost proud, but Adrien winces as he listens and realises Jordan probably doesn’t understand the implications of what he’s recounting. “He said he couldn’t be the man of the household for us so could I take care of my mum please and do right by her because he needed to go away and it was all for the best.”

“Right,” he chokes out, and bites his lip. He walks over to look out of the window in the kitchen, lifting aside the gauzy curtains with two fingers. The city is still aglow at this hour, stretching into the distance. Maybe one of those lights is Jordan’s bedroom window. Maybe Jordan is staring out a window too, watching for the silhouette of a Parisian superhero against the backdrop of the cityscape.

He daren’t contradict what seem to be the parting words of Jordan’s father, but he has to qualify, somehow, the kind of stoicism they idealise, the familial support they eschew. “Right,” Adrien says again, as he gathers his thoughts. “Big boys do go to bed themselves. But do you know what a superhero would do, Jordan?” 

“What?” Jordan obliges him by echoing.

“A superhero would run into the room anyway. And hug his mum, and maybe sing a lullaby to her so they could both get some sleep. Do you know any lullabies?” 

“Oh, oh, I know one about pirates!”

He can’t help the smile that breaks out over his face. “That’ll do perfectly. Are you going to try it now?”

Jordan’s too earnest to give him an answer. All he hears over the line is the sound of a door being opened, then a woman’s voice tiredly saying, “Jordan, baby?” He flinches at the sudden spike in volume as Jordan presumably drops the phone to one side, but he doesn’t hold it away from his ear. He wants to catch every second of this.

“Oh, my sweet boy,” he hears Jordan’s mum murmur, and he’s still just watching the city lights, miles away from them in all probability, but this is real. This is everything he’s been missing. There are tears standing in his eyes as he waits there, uninvited, living vicariously off the reunion he’s never had, the maternal embrace he can barely remember. “Bye, Jordan,” he mutters, and hangs up just as the boy starts in on his favourite nursery rhyme. 

He takes a deep breath. It is coming on half past five and the air smells like chocolate and longing. He wipes the tears from his cheeks, holding the phone limply. 

He doesn’t know how long he stands there before Marinette’s voice breaks the silence. “You haven’t made chocolate chip cookies since Tikki was still around,” she comments, almost casually.

“Maybe I just had a craving,” he replies, and they both know he’s skirting the subject of their kwamis as well as of his emotional state. He takes a moment before turning away from the window to face her, to put on a weak smile that doesn’t detract at all from the look he knows she’ll recognise again as the one he gets when thinking about his mother. “How long have you been here?”

The answer to his question is all there in her posture and stance: she’s leaning in the doorway, eyes soft on him in what he calls her melting look.

She’s swaddled in an oversize dark grey shirt of his, small and fairy-like in this light. _I’m in love with this all_ , he thinks, the words not his own but familiar nevertheless; and what does he have to do, to get to keep it?

As he watches, she pulls away from the doorframe and walks right up to him, touching a hand to his cheek. “You okay?” she asks, in lieu of answering.

He smiles and leans into her touch. It’s enough for her to understand what he means. “Cookies for breakfast, then,” she says, moving on so he can follow her out of his melancholy mood. “I’ll make cheese toasties.” 

While she’s sticking bread into the toaster and brewing up some coffee (for him; she reserves coffee for all-nighters when on tight project deadlines), he clears the counter space. For a while all is quiet except for the periodic clinking of dishes.

He kneels to stow the leftover flour back in its cupboard. “How’s your head?” he asks, as it occurs to him that there must be a reason she’s up this early when she was so tired the night before. Instantly he’s stricken with guilt. What if she woke up alone, in pain and concussed? Sometimes the symptoms don’t show up immediately; he could have missed it last night. Alarmed at the thought, he looks back over his shoulder at her, brow furrowed in concern.

“I’m fine,” she assures him, taking the wooden spatula he washed earlier off the draining board and over to the dish towel. “No dizziness, no disorientation, no difficulty concentrating. It just got cold.”

_Cold without you there_ is what she means but doesn’t say. She doesn’t need to. “Sorry,” he apologises, reflexively rubbing at the back of his neck with one hand. “I just — I, uh…”

“Had a nightmare?” she finishes his sentence for him, returning the now dry spatula back to its rightful spot in a top drawer. Adrien looks up at her in wonder. She smiles faintly. “I know how your breathing changes when you have bad dreams. I was going to wait for you to come back to bed. That’s… that’s what I usually do.”

_She knows_ , he thinks, and then  _Oh._ Of course she’s noticed the times he’s had to get up in the middle of the night and find something to distract himself with.

He always goes back to her, but only once he stops feeling the terror clawing at his insides. Only once he’s subdued the uncanny dissonance of his dreams that sometimes feel like both memory and imagination.

She sighs. He’s been staring at her at a loss for words, mouth gaping slightly. “Plagg warned me about this,” she tells him, going over to the table in the centre of the kitchen and sitting down so she’s facing him. She pulls her legs up onto the chair so that she’s perched cross-legged atop it. “He said that without his protection it was going to catch up to you sooner or later.”

“What?” Adrien says. In a fugue state, he leans against the counter, as if steadying himself for what she’s saying.

“Do you know how many times you’ve died for me?” She meshes her fingers together on the table in front of her and seems to address her question to the bruises on her knuckles. 

“Died for you?” he repeats wonderingly. “Mari, I’m pretty sure I’m alive right now.”

She huffs, half wanting to laugh at his strange tone, half solemn. “I know how many times,” she tells him. “Plagg was shielding you from the psychic brunt of, well, remembering what it feels like to die. Or just fade out of existence; you did that too, on occasion,” she muses.

For a moment Adrien gets a flash of a memory. He’s hugging her, crouching between her and Timebreaker, and the akuma villain’s touch burns in the first second she steals his temporal energy. It makes him _boil_ , right out of himself, scatters his mind so all he can think is her name until he forgets he’s even there, can’t seem to collect his thoughts as they disperse through the air — but her name is the last thing he holds onto. Only that never happened, and even if it did he didn’t know her name when they faced down Timebreaker, so… So…

“Adrien?” Marinette says worriedly, and he snaps back to reality.

“Did you remember something?” she asks, and then cuts him off from answering. “Wait, don’t. If it’s a continuum paradox or anything like that you shouldn’t even— I shouldn’t have been thinking aloud.”

“Literally none of what you just said makes any sense to me,” he finds himself saying, because when he grasps at the fragment of memory it’s gone anyway. He can barely even remember remembering it. “But anyway it’s — it’s not relevant. I’m not dreaming about dying. Um. Not exactly. As in, that’s not what scares me, in the dreams.”

It’s her turn to look confused. “I always thought — but then what are your nightmares about?”

She’s gazing at him with so much love and fear that he can hardly stand it. She’s been so sure of what’s going on with him, only to find out she’s been wrong all along, and it’s terrifying.

“It doesn’t matter,” he hedges, if only to get her to stop looking so distressed. He shifts from foot to foot, suddenly aware of the distance he’s putting between the two of them. The kitchen has never felt so large. “They’re just dreams.”

He can feel her scrutiny without even looking up. “It’s worse tonight, though, isn’t it,” Marinette says slowly, with an air of realisation.

“What happened?” she asks, at the same time as he exclaims, “Are my cookies burning?” 

“Don’t change the subject,” Marinette immediately lectures him, but then she sniffs at the air. She blinks, taken aback, then squints at him suspiciously before raising an eyebrow in the direction of the oven as if checking for actual smoke. “You set the timer, didn’t you?”

“Yes, but they’re not all the same size. Maybe I should check,” Adrien replies, wringing his hands anxiously. He catches her bemused smile. “What?”

“Nothing, I just realised my boyfriend is a dork who gets worked up and then defensive about the wellbeing of his baked goods. They should still be fine,” she assures him.

“You sure? Feline instincts,” he says, edging nervously over to peek into the oven.

“Baker’s daughter,” she counters, but as it turns out, they’re both partially right. He rescues the borderline cases, setting them down on a large plate, and leaves the rest in the oven to finish. Since the percolator has stopped making its little chugging noises for a while now, she gets up to pour his coffee and make herself tea. He also takes out the cheese toasties, which are gooey and just starting to brown.

They take turns to blow lightly on the cookies, he watching her flushed cheeks puffing over the rim of his mug when it’s her turn. It’s a good break from the precedent solemnity of their conversation. After a couple minutes of companionable quiet, he’s settled enough that he isn’t even taken aback when she quietly says, “It’s not the injury that’s got you freaked, is it. Even though you keep fussing about it.”

He delicately selects a cookie from the pile and gestures for her to do the same. She hums and picks up some toast instead. Marinette prefers to start the day with something savoury. 

He fiddles with his cookie, pondering his words. “No,” he finally says, staring at a particularly melty chocolate chip. He licks at it. “It’s just. We’re _settled_ , you know? We go to class. We have lunch dates. And then yesterday…”

He breaks off, but the disjointedness of his words tells her more than he knows how to. “It would be ridiculous for us to survive magical akuma villains together and then be defeated by a mugger, you know,” she says, and of course she’s understood perfectly what’s bothering him.

“I know,” he murmurs, biting into his cookie. “This isn’t too bad,” he remarks, surprised.

She pretends to look affronted. “It’s a Dupain-Cheng signature recipe, it’s better than ‘not bad’.”

“No, as in — I didn’t have the right type of flour on hand. Had to improvise and compensate on gut feel.” He takes another bite and judges, “It’s makeshift, but it’ll do.” 

A beat. “Like this life?” she says, casual as anything. He nearly chokes on his cookie.

“What?” he rasps, as soon as his airways are clear enough. Between Marinette and Sabine he’s spent his last few hours of consciousness being consecutively stumped by the Dupain-Cheng women.

Marinette nibbles on a bit of her bread crust and sips at her tea. “You miss it,” she tells him, and there is a lucid honesty in her visage that borders on uncanny. “You miss getting to put on the suit and swoop in to save people.”

There’s a lump in his throat suddenly. “You do too,” he says, calling her bluff.

“No,” she refutes. “I don’t, because we’re still the same people, Adrien. Last night, today, _every day_ , you are as much of a hero as you have always been.”

She’s suddenly almost fierce, nostrils flaring and eyes intent on him, but he matches her intensity as he interjects, “I used to be useful, as Chat Noir.” His voice is edged and somewhat sharper than he means it to be. It cuts at him. It chafes. “In fact, I got used to being useful.” 

She’s stunned, almost hurt. “Adrien…”

_The best part of me is you_ , he wants to tell her, _and I can’t lose you._  It’s all roiled up in his head, in one big mess: his fear of losing her in the most ordinary of ways, his self-esteem now that he’s just plain old Adrien. (How can he keep this?)

But instead he says, pushing past her objection, “Chat Noir was the best version of me that I knew how to be.” It’s almost the same thing. He is his best self around her. Then _and_ now.

“Is that why you leave?” she interrupts. He’s horrified at the hurt in her voice, but she doesn’t look up to meet his eyes. “Is that why you don’t stay with me when you need help, even though you are _always_ there when I need you? Adrien, you don’t have to defeat villains and pull people out of harm’s way to save them. And you don’t have to _deserve_ being saved yourself.”

They’ve left aside their breakfast. Her voice quivers dangerously with the weight of her sincerity. “And I loved _you_ first. Not some snappy-talking superhero alter ego. I love the guy who can… who calms down a little boy over the phone at five in the morning. Who _helps_ him stop his mother crying herself to sleep alone. _That’s enough._ ” 

He lets her take his hand and squeezes back when she does. But it’s such a cheesy moment that he has to make fun of her then, he has to break the spell. “Oh, my _bug_ -uette, is that really what you think of me?”

“Yes—” she starts to say, but then registers what he called her. “Oh, no. Not again with the pastry nicknames.”

“Aww, you know you love them, _Mari_ -zipan,” he coos, “and besides, you’re the one who made a metaphor about our lives as baked goods.”

She stuffs a cookie in his mouth to get him to shut up. He makes muffled noises of protest while he chews it and she laughs, polishing off her toast.

This is what it’s like with them, over the years they’ve known each other: heartfelt and difficult conversations that segue right back into laughter and solidarity. _I’m in love with this all_ , he thinks again, memorising her in this light. No one else in the world shares all his secrets. With no one else in the world can he be open and vulnerable and so much himself.

As his chuckling peters out, she catches sight of the aftermath of his rapid cookie consumption. “There’s chocolate on your face,” she tells him, the laughter bubbling just beneath her voice.

Adrien licks his lips thoroughly. “Gone?”

“No, no it’s like… on your chin. Almost on your neck. How did you get chocolate there?” She looks mildly exasperated as she comes over to his side of the table. With her thumb she rubs ineffectually at his jawline for a moment, tongue sticking out from one side of her mouth as she concentrates.

How can she not know what she’s doing to him?

“Mari,” he manages to say, and when she locks gazes with him he can hear her breath catching. There is a question in his eyes, and hers don’t waver as she leans down to lick a long, slow line down his neck.

That’s… not quite what he was expecting. “Did you really just _lick chocolate_ off me?” he manages to say, pulling a look like he’s mock-scandalised, but then his voice disappears into breathiness as she starts sucking at his neck. She’s going to leave a hickey there, just like when they were teenagers, and it’ll show for sure over the collar of his shirt when he goes in for class, but he doesn’t even care.

She pulls back and puts her hand on his cheek, which he realises is wet. “You’re crying,” he hears her say. She must have tasted the salt of his tears running down to her lips. He hasn’t even noticed up till now.

(Once, he tasted her blood as he kissed her fingers, bleeding from the clumsy sewing needle.)

“We left it all behind,” he says, like a confession, “or at least we said we would. Mari, just… just don’t ever go where I can’t follow.”

Because he’s always following her. Across the rooftops of Paris, to their university, out of his sadness at four in the morning.

“Never,” she swears fiercely, and then she’s kissing him as if to prove her resolution, lips hard against his but mostly closed. He probably has morning breath mixed with chocolate cookie and he’s wearing polka-dotted cotton pyjamas but she’s all over him anyway, just like no time has passed since last night in the hospital, when they could barely keep their hands off each other. “How could you possibly think I would?” she says, but he’s too lost in every sensation of her, too dispersed and without himself, to pull himself together enough to answer her. So he just watches her, dopily, as she bends and lifts him off his chair, onto the table.

They damn near crash into the cookies and the toast and the mugs and without their reflexes the clean-up would have been hell. But he’s absorbed in letting his fingers examine every bit of her, lingering over the occasional raised scar tissue, the calluses on her fingers from all the sewing she insists on doing personally.

The day is breaking and they are coming together. Breathless, heady in the moment, he lays back as she leans down over him. The curtains are gauzy and translucent; they should probably draw them for privacy. But then her scent is washing over him and her hair is tickling his face slightly and he sighs against the scent of her skin.

She deepens the kiss. He lets her wash over him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’m flinching for all your disgust at my first, shoddy attempt at writing mild steamy times. And your groans when you notice that I have blatantly gotten each of them to eat the characteristic food of the other's kwami, and even wear clothing like the other's superhero costume. Yeah. Yeah, I'm lame.
> 
> My personal life is… emotionally fraught at time of posting. I wrote for catharsis and it shows. I’m sorry ._.
> 
> “I’m in love with this all” is a quote from Virginia Woolf’s lovely To the Lighthouse. The ending scene draws from the feel of Saturday by Ian McEwan. Literature, aw yeah!


End file.
